Afterlands Read online

  Tyson is the sort of man who will always feel himself assailed.

  Now Chusley is guiding Tukulito back from the rim of the grave, encouraging her in a mild, stammering voice: Come, Hannah, please, you must. You must have some tea. Some tea now. She moves as if newly blind. Anyone can see he is in love with her: a married woman, dark and rather plain, her head too large for her tiny sloped shoulders. Yet she gains loyal admirers—such as Tyson himself, on the ice. Such as Kruger, who may also have been her lover.

  Tyson is pained and also surprised to see Kruger here, having heard rumours that the man had returned to Europe, like some of the other crewmen. Soon after the publication of Arctic Experiences Tyson received a letter from Kruger and, deeply offended, had not replied.

  To disregard the wishes of the dying can be an act of love—so the Reverend Cowan told Tyson before the burial. The father, especially, will need a body to mourn on his return. And Cowan explained how the Esquimau child, delirious in fever, had made her mother promise to bury her at sea, like a certain crewman who had died of the pleurisy on that sealing ship that plucked them from the ice. The Tigress, Tyson said. Yes, he remembered that man. Pockets weighted with shot, body swaddled in his own blanket. While the sealers stood by, bowing rain-drenched heads, the man’s three brothers had lugged him over the gunwale and let him drop into seas still scraping and rattling with ice—slabs and pashy floes and slurry. Tyson had watched, grim-eyed, yet with a survivor’s numb detachment, his belly packed, mind dulled. … Cowan reported that at the time it had not seemed to Hannah that Punnie had noticed the event, yet three years later as she lay burning in bed—fingers scuttering over the counterpane as if at the keyboard—she remembered. Why, she even remembered the dead man’s name: Obadiah Squires. I want to be buried in that cold water, Mama, she’d said in English. She would only use English now. Poor Hannah feared that she was forgetting her mother tongue. But my darling, you are getting better! she’d said, laughing and crying at the same time—you will not need to be buried on land or at sea!

  Promise me, Mama.

  Hannah, just do as she asks! Cowan had told her. Promise her! Perhaps it will calm her!

  And she’d glanced at the physician, who nodded soberly, then at Chusley, who was watching the child’s moving fingers with wide, blood-rimmed eyes, perhaps reading a familiar tune in their motions. The mother was known to all as quietly decisive, but at that moment she seemed utterly lost. At last she leaned close to her daughter’s ear, stroking the freshly shaved head, and gave her word.

  They file down the gravel path to Pleasant Valley Road. Mourners will walk more slowly from the grave of a child, but because it’s downhill the numb-legged gathering moves with some clumsiness, faster than it means to, as if fleeing the site. Sarah Budington and Sydney in his stovepipe hat support Tukulito, dwarfing her, one on either side. They help her into the funeral brougham waiting by the churchyard gate and get in after her. Four black horses draw the brougham away. Cowan and Miss Crombie and Chusley and the other mourners climb into chaises and buggies and follow in a straggling procession back to the Budingtons’ parlour.

  There will be a wide selection of spirits, knowing Budington, thinks Tyson, who is now a teetotaller. He knows that Budington will be unhappy to have him in his house, but this is New England and the man won’t want to make a scene—at least not until he has absorbed a few drams. There’s also the German to consider. His letter all but challenged Tyson to a duel. Still, Tyson wants to be able to give Tukulito his heartfelt sympathies, and after what they went through together on the ice, he must.

  Of course he’s also drawn by the prospect of another test.

  He declines an invitation to board a neighbour’s buggy, meaning to walk, then realizes that Kruger, behind him, has already done the same. The final buggy rattles past Tyson and he walks steadily up the middle of the road, inhaling the wheel dust that hovers in the sun’s last amber. The creaking of the buggy’s axle fades. Kruger’s footfalls sound some dozen paces behind. Tyson stifles a cough. It seems important not to accelerate, either. He slows down. In silence the last buggy rounds a curve in the road, vanishing behind a stand of black cypresslike pines.

  Tyson stops, plants his feet, pivots from the waist up.

  Well, shall we walk the rest of the way together, Mr Kruger?

  For a moment it seems that Kruger will sweep past the larger Tyson without a word, but he halts abreast, gives Tyson a challenging look from under his hatbrim, then turns his eyes up the road.

  Yes, and why should we not. And he strides on with his rolling, wide-stepping sailor’s gait. The German accent is faint, although he still pronounces w like v, says und for and.

  Especially on a day like this, says Tyson, catching up. His tone, while hardly fawning, is mild enough to broach the possibility of peace. Why revive finished battles? A sentimental part of him has always yearned to be liked as well as feared.

  You’re referring to the weather, Mr Tyson? The veather. Yes, a fine day to make amends.

  I refer to the funeral of a child who shared our suffering and all but died with us. And I have no amends to make.

  As they walk in silence on this road even the tiniest stone has its shadow. For a moment, their stride rhythms merging, they’re in step.

  Still, Tyson says softly, the weather is a true mercy. It’s a harder thing to watch a body laid in frozen sod.

  Ah, poor Punnie! Kruger exclaims.

  That’s it for a while. At last Tyson ventures, I do recall how you would often play with her and the other children on the ship. … German games, were they not?

  Children’s games are children’s games. Leave your borders and uniforms out of it.

  Tyson bolts a look at him and then down at his own moving, side-striped trousers. You think a life without uniforms is possible, Kruger? How naïve that is of you. Who would protect our settlers under threat in the West? Who kept this country together, North and South, and emancipated the slaves?

  I didn’t suppose you would come, says Kruger.

  I shared their snowhut, Kruger.

  Yes, and expressed disgust over Tukulito’s housekeeping in your book. Also her habits. I didn’t suppose you would dare coming. You disgraced her too. Disgraced everyone but yourself.

  You retain a special concern for her, I see.

  Ah, and you not? Kruger’s smile is chilling. You can go to hell.

  Tyson holds his composure. Slowly and earnestly self-educated, he feels awkward around the Educated, easily outmanoeuvred, an elephant trying to stamp on a panther. In fact Kruger has little more real schooling than Tyson—who as an orphan went to work in a Newark foundry, then escaped to sea—but Kruger is from a once-bourgeois family with bookish leanings, and his manner on the ice provoked Tyson sorely. But he had to harden himself to insolence out there, where at first the foreign crewmen were armed and he was not, and he desperately hoped to avoid mutiny and get the lot of them home.

  The book was a journal, Kruger. We were all of us fighting to survive. Surely you felt moments of disgust with the men of your snowhut?

  You said that your journal was lost—there in your prologue it said so, that you had to re-complete it from a few notes. You scarcely took any time at it, either. There were as many stories as there were castaways but you fed yours to the public first. They ate their fill, then they left the mess-hall. You received my letter?

  You could hardly have expected a reply. You seemed to be hoping for pistols at dawn, in Central Park.

  Kruger actually laughs. Damn lucky for you there was none of that. I seem to be increasingly unkillable. The polar seas couldn’t manage it and last week also the East River failed.

  I’ve no idea at all what you’re saying.

  But you ought to, you above all! On the ice I kept you alive. Count Meyer wanted a war. There was that time also, the one night when you were about—

  Tyson stops, stamps his foot on the road and cries, God damn it, man, have you really come to the fun
eral of this poor child just to chastise me? I kept you alive. I was your ranking officer. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten our last weeks out there!

  Kruger stares from under his hatbrim, arms stiff at his sides. For a moment it seems he is trying to nerve himself to draw a weapon from his packed pockets. Well, he says finally, I shall be leaving here—then looks down at his scuffed but polished boots, dusty now, and turns and walks up the road. It takes Tyson a moment to realize that he means he will be leaving the area, perhaps the country, not merely the spot where he was standing.

  Tyson walks the rest of the way behind Kruger, who gradually pulls ahead. They pass a grey farmhouse set back in a stubble field. A clutch of crows peers up in silence from a furrow where something intriguing lies out of sight. In a woodlot there’s a teetering rank of headstones, like a frozen demonstration of the force of gravity; Tyson’s sharp eye distinguishes a date brought out by the sun’s last rays, maybe victims of the Indian chieftain, King Philip. The English settlers in this area were exterminated. But they had sprung back. And in June of this year Custer and his bluecoat cavalry were wiped out, but many more soldiers had come after them to drive the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the other hostiles farther back into the wilderness—farther back, Tyson feels, into the human past that is their true habitat. He likes Hannah and Joe very much, he admires them truly, but he takes it for granted that they are unusually advanced members of a primitive, doomed race. The child’s death is a heartbreak, yet in some parlour of the mind it gratifies the vision of racial destiny that Tyson shares with his era. The Esquimau has no resistance to the ailments of civilization, and that is telling. The native is but an episode in the advance of the Caucasian. Where did he read that? A recent editorial, perhaps in the Tribune. The tone was neither hostile nor contemptuous. It was simply the pragmatism of progress.

  Tyson’s wife and son were to have accompanied him to the funeral, but he and Emmaline had quarrelled again and he had left for the train alone. Of all the things that had kept him alive on the ice—fear of disgrace and the hope for fame (the two are really one), duty to the flag and to God, old habits of discipline, hopes of exposing Budington, hopes of punishing the crew, dreams of a bath and fresh oysters with horseradish and vinegar and her hot crusty bread, richly buttered, dripping with molasses—none seemed as important as Emmaline and little George. He had his duty to them too. Above all, he had his Love. In the breast pocket of his shirt he kept a torque of strawberry blonde hair with a circlet of the boy’s auburn hair linked through it. Only let me return and I’ll never again look complacently, or with bored aversion, on the comforts of home. On the ice he’d contemplated Home so avidly. And somehow in the fragrant, copious kitchen of his meditations he’d altered it—or his absence had. On his return as a hero he seemed to feel, naturally enough, that some kind of reward was in order, but the boy seemed a changeling, his wife a disappointing impostor. Stern-faced, stolid, thorough—not the imagined bride who’d helped keep his heart beating in that hell.

  Clearly she found him changed as well. His faith had been fractured. Because God had not been out there. He couldn’t tell her that in the Arctic an interstellar cold and darkness dipped down to touch the planet’s bare scalp. As a whaler, then a mate, then a captain, Tyson had been up there often before, but never in such a naked way. He was struck through by that cold and darkness and carried them back to the human South like an infection. The house became a chambered vault of ice. In recreating his journal for the book, he’d often referred to God’s watchful Providence on the ice, and the repeated act of writing the words had seemed to trick back some faith—though never for long. He has constructed himself around various loyalties, and his fame is built on just that, yet now it seems he’s destined to fail—to leave on the ice—his wife and small son. It’s an era when such an act can destroy you. There’s a mistress now too. But the new expedition he will lead (to initiate a white colonization of the Arctic) will remove him from the scene for now and allow him to go on convincing others that he’s still what he’s thought to be.

  What he’s thought to be is a man of his time. The ice has made him a man of our time.

  As the coloured maid admits him to the vestibule he can hear Kruger being introduced in the parlour. When Tyson finally enters, a hush falls. Kruger, in his overcoat, is kneeling in front of Tukulito, who is collapsed, dwarfed, in a deep wing chair by the hearth. Kruger holds her hand in his two hands—an almost courtly posture. Now, seeing Tyson, he rises, releasing her hand, and steps back, though not far. His fists disappear behind him and he averts his face as if to study the Civil War lithograph hung over the sideboard. Tyson’s scalp burns. The house seems very warm. It hits him that perhaps the German has still not removed his overcoat because he means to pocket some of the lesser crystal by the decanters. That or it’s the only black thing he owns. The Budingtons receive Tyson with frosty correctness. Their mouths are compressed as if the glasses between their fingers hold not sherry but vinegar. The mourners stare with bright indecisive eyes, as if torn between interest in Tyson, fresh from the lecture circuit, and fealty to the ruined Budingtons. Tukulito draws herself out of the chair and stands—Tyson begging her not to rise—and whispers his name. Face shrunken with sorrow she smiles a little behind her veil to pretend she is all right. On the ice he never once heard her complain. In the crook of her arm is a battered Esquimau doll—Punnie’s doll, Tyson recalls it well, with its pouting sinew mouth; boy dolls smile, the child once informed him, the girl ones they all frown. Tukulito sets out across the carpet toward Tyson, who moves to intercept her before she can faint.

  Chihuahua State, Mexico, New Year’s Day 1877

  HE EMERGES FROM THE WINE-CELLAR DIMNESS and chill of the cantina and lifts his face to the sun still afloat over the plaza, still parching its border of adobe shops and acre of rusty dirt with such severity that it seems this town, Maria Madre, has become the sun’s exclusive target. Even now, late afternoon, the throbbing air hits him like a draft from a boiler-room hatch. And the roar of the fiesta—the hollering, the song and the talk, the blurting of trumpets and fast strumming of guitars—seems the peculiar and complex clamour of that heat.

  He follows a troupe of drunkards merrily shouldering their way to the front. They are got up in tight short jackets, broadcloth trousers, boots whose blacking holds the cayenne dust. Around Kruger young women in hoopskirts, tortoiseshell combs in their blue-black hair, press together on tiptoe in their cliques or stand perched in side-on embraces, two to a wooden chair, a half dozen to a bench. Passing them he breathes more deeply, not so much to inflate his chest as to take in as much of them as he can. A man with a cigarillo and tusky moustaches as white as his hair shoulders a grandson who squints stoically through the flies. The man offers the boy—perhaps five years old—a puff of his cigarillo. The boy gravely accepts.

  Toward the front, seeming to hover above the crowd, a stout matron sits sidesaddle on a mare, her sun hat as broad as a parasol. The bridle is held by an old Indian in livery who stands at attention by the mare’s head with his heels together, dirty feet fanned out, eyes closed. He’s snoring. A wide, acorn-coloured face, like Ebierbing’s poised above a seal-hole.

  Kruger strokes the drowsing mare’s forelocks and muzzle and tucks his hand into the nosebag. At the bottom he finds untouched corn and scoops and pockets a handful. The mare twitches, shies her head. Her gummed, blinkered eye, brown as syrup, pops open and considers him. A reflection in the eye makes him look behind: three other Indians, all in white blouses, have laddered themselves rump on shoulders in the manner of circus acrobats. The top man surveys the chaos from under the brim of a hawk-feathered bowler, the middle one gnaws at a tortilla, and the bottom one, squat and husky with cannonball calves, his bare feet planted, has no view of anything but still grins with buck teeth as sweat courses down his cheeks. Giving Kruger a second look—everybody does that here—he grins bigger and Kruger realizes he was not actually smiling before, the teeth project so shar
ply that he can’t close his lips.

  Kruger reaches the crowdfront where children in blossom-bright outfits festoon the crux and boughs of an ancient pecan. Massed along the eaves of shops across the plaza more onlookers, sharply defined by the back-sun, stand or hunker or sit with legs lolling. Far behind them, bordering the world to the southwest, a grey reef of barren peaks.

  The plaza itself is vacant. Kruger is unsure of what’s to come. In the cantina various revellers had competed to explain matters, gathering around this compact gringo with his heavy brow and hands, pipe with a curved stem, ratty bow tie. At last two drunken rancheros, despairing of his Spanish, began to mime a confrontation involving on one side a bull—a man planting the ends of two soup spoons on his lowered brow and lurching around the cantina, butting at a ring of giddy onlookers—and on the other side … what? A man with a broken nose raked sideways at a drastic angle stood swaying, head back, hands raised with the fingers curled, as if clinging to a precipice. Eyes in a blind squint. Clearly insensible to the pain it should be causing, he kept pursing up the nose and forcing out rough, bestial snufflings. Onlookers slapped at thighs and tables. A bear, Kruger assumed, but then the bull huffed and charged and the bear, roaring theatrically, snatched the bull’s horns and lobbed them aside and cinched its opponent round the waist from above and the two men, near spastic with mirth, started grappling wildly, the circle of spectators yipping and cheering. So perhaps it was to be some kind of contest between men in animal costume? Some annual indigenous rite. Kruger drained his mug of gluey pulque and chuckled around his pipestem as the men, now locked in earnest, wheeled as one over the clay floor in the manner of a keg rolling over a ship’s tilting deck.